Down To Earth

We need to invest big time in weather
sciences. This is where our future security lies.
Monsoon is our finance minister and it is not just
capricious, but perhaps the most globalised
Indian.

This is
our season of despair. This year, it would seem,
the gods have been most unkind to Indian farmers.
Early in the year came the weird weather events,
like hailstorms and freak and untimely rains that
destroyed standing crops. Nobody knew what was
happening. After all, each year we witness a
natural weather phenomenon called the Western
Disturbance, winds that emanate from the
Mediterranean and travel eastward towards India.
What was new this year was the sheer
“freakiness” of these disturbances,
which brought extreme rain with unusual frequency
and intensity. More importantly, instead of
“breaking” over the Himalayas, as
these disturbances are prone to do, these winds
with moisture travelled eastward towards Bengal
and even southward towards Madhya Pradesh.
Meteorologists were spooked.

And farmers, watching
their standing crops destroyed before their eyes,
were caught off guard. Their pain was palpable. My
colleagues who went to understand what was
happening in rural Uttar Pradesh after these
events came back with tales of utter shock.
Farmers were already caught in a spiral of debt
because of the increasing cost of agriculture and
now this. It was nothing less than
carnage.

But this was only the
beginning of the year, the first cropping season.
Then came the whopper of a drought season, linked
to El Niño—warming of the Pacific
that gives the monsoon a fever. In many parts of
the country, this would be the second or third or
even the fourth consecutive monsoon failure. It is
a terrible situation, with no water for crops,
livestock or drinking in many
parts.

The question is: will it
end soon, or is it a beginning, a glimpse of what
the future looks like? The answer to this question
holds the difference between life and death,
literally.

The fact is if we
dismiss this season of despair as a freak year,
then we will never put into place the corrections
so desperately needed in a future that is even
more risky and makes us even more vulnerable.
Meteorologists will tell you that the weather is
becoming more erratic, more confounding and
definitely more devastating. Even if they hesitate
to use the word “climate”, they will
agree that something new is afoot. In other words,
this is not just natural weather variability, but
portends long-term changes.

So what do we
do?

First, we need to invest
big time in weather sciences. This is where our
future security lies. Monsoon is our finance
minister and it is not just capricious, but
perhaps the most globalised Indian. We need to
invest in the science of monsoons and weather
forecasting. In the last budget, there was
across-the-board cut in the money allocated to all
scientific ministries. This means institutions
following and learning the monsoon, like the
Pune-based Indian Institute of Tropical
Meteorology, could see as much as a 25-30 per cent
reduction in their annual budget. This is
short-sighted, if not downright foolish. We need
to spend more, not less, on this lifeline
science.

Second, we need to do
much more to fix our agrarian crisis. It is clear
that farmers are caught in a double bind. On the
one hand, costs of all inputs, particularly labour
and water, are increasing and on the other hand,
there are controls on food prices. Our food
pricing policy is built on the premise that we are
a poor country, so consumers must be protected.
But this means farmers—who are also
consumers of food—are not paid remunerative
prices for their product. And all the big talk
about deregulation and ease of doing business
never makes it to their fields. They are
restrained in where they can sell; prices are
artificially “fixed”; and when
shortages grow, government rushes to buy from
heavily subsidised global farms. This cannot go
on.

Third, we need to plan
for development knowing that weather will be more
variable and more extreme. This means doing all
that we know has to be done. There is no
rocket science here. Build water and drainage
infrastructure that can both hold water when there
is excess rain and recharge groundwater when rain
fails. Again, in this budget, the government has
slashed investment in irrigation. We are not even
using the optimal potential of rural employment to
build water security. We have just not understood
that in a climate-risked India, water has to be
our obsession. Infrastructure—everything
from cities and roads to ports and dams—must
be built in a way that they are compliant with
best environmental safeguards.

Fourth, knowing that
building resilience and adapting to these changes
is not enough, we need to vastly strengthen
systems to compute farmers’ loss and pay for
damage— quickly and properly. At present,
our so-called crop insurance schemes are poorly
designed and even more poorly executed. Once
again, this cannot go on.

Let’s get
our heads out of the sand and smell the wind. Only
then can we stop the killing
fields.